Of Course You Can
Of course you can. Because I teach, and because English, that language that I’ve known since before I was born, is the only thing I know well enough to teach, people, seldom students, never students actually, sometimes ask, “How can I learn to write?”
The only answer I can honestly give is: you can’t. You already know how. What you’re really asking is, how can I convince myself that I know how to write, at least convince myself well enough that I can come to write with comfort, even ease, even well enough that I might like, instead of fear, writing? That second question, the answer is quite simple. It’s believing the simplicity that makes the whole thing so damnably hard.
I took a course in rhetoric once. Everyone who presumes to teach English must at least, at the very least, presume to know what rhetoric means. And it was there that I learned that what people as old as Aristotle and as young as Edwin Newman are saying or have said about the godly art of written intercourse. As I presume to understand it, rhetoric is the art of making what you write, or say, or perform fit the audience for whom you are writing, to whom you are speaking, at whom you are performing. It’s that fit that gives us fits.
Nobody knows anybody very well anymore. How do you make gloves for someone you’ve never measured? Audiences are best measured with a five-section expandable rule. When you look at something, see it. When you hear something, let its melody imprint your mind. Let the feel of the things you touch linger on your skin. Memorize aromas. Taste with taste. Store these measurements within you; there’s always ample room. And when you are called upon to write, to speak, or to perform, you’ll know, or more precisely feel, what it is your audience is able to absorb.
And when this works for you, do it again, and again, and again, until it works for everyone. If you care.